July 1, 2006

No article on a classified program gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing. Often, we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials, so they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our front pages.

Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public's interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best judgment.

The two editors -- Dean Baquet and Bill Keller -- rely heavily on the idea that government officials shouldn't have the final say over what gets out and what remains secret. Citizens need to be able to evaluate these officials, who can't be trusted controlling the flow of information. As Baquet and Keller put it: "They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes." Government officials are biased toward suppressing things that make them look bad, and the press needs to bring out the full story, so that citizens can exercise the independent judgment that is crucial to democracy.

But the recently revealed secrets -- about the surveillance of telephone call patterns and financial transactions -- were not cases of government suppressing failures. These ongoing programs were successful, and revealing the secrets impaired the operation of very significant efforts in the war on terrorism. I realize that there are arguments that people need to know about successes that are subject to controversy: the telephone surveillance program is attacked as an illegal invasion of privacy.

Here, Baquet and Keller have written a lengthy defense of their behavior, behavior that they know has been severely criticized, even called "treason." Despite the length, the piece seems padded. Look at that last paragraph in the blockquote above. We judge, we weigh, we make judgments. Essentially, trust us. Trust us, because you shouldn't just trust the government. Agreed, but why should we trust you? We look at what you just did and feel mistrustful. What in these generic remarks cures that mistrust? You tell us you really did think about it. Those who abhor what you did will not feel inspired to trust you when you say this is where we ended up when we really thought deeply about it.

MORE: Here's a related article in tomorrow's NYT, going into the history of publishing government secrets. It quotes Ben Bradlee's memoir:

"Officials often — more often than not, in my experience — use the claim of national security as a smoke screen to cover up their own embarrassment."

It's good to remember the problem with trusting the government. It will want to cover up mistakes. But let's also remember that this is not the case with the recent disclosures.

Exactly. With great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately, Baquet and Keller have given us no reason to believe that they exercise their power responsibly. Oh well. Given the trend of market forces, Baquet and Keller will be out of business soon enough. And they'll probably still be wondering why.

I just want to say that I love the NYT and hope it solves its business and other problems. I'm not even considering stopping reading it or ending home delivery, which I've taken for decades.

216 comments:

The behavior of these editors is treasonous. They are aiding and abetting the criminal activities of others (leakers.) They fail the test of right-to-know versus need-to-know as they play the fifth column in support of the terrorists to actively undermine our government.

I would be less upset by the NYTimes' disclosures if it could have pointed to even the slightest indication that the government's financial tracking program was being abused in an unlawful manner or didn't have appropriate oversight. Instead, it seems the piece was motivated solely by the press' inherent animus against all government programs that are unrelated to income redistribution or racial preferences...

You say the reporting impaired the successful operations. It's possible that it has, but then again government officials can simply assert that without any evidence.

Tom Kean was quoted somewhere saying that reporting on the existence of the Swift monitoring would impair its efficacy because it would make the European bankers leery of cooperating. Why? Apparently because the program violates European privacy laws.

That sounds like a political and diplomatic problem, not a national-security one. It certainly isn't newspapers' job to prevent embarrassment.

All the truth? The truth about what you, Adam, have done that you wished nobody knew? The truth about everything at every place at every time?

You're creating an idealized vision of the impossible, for one thing, Adam. Should the Chicago Tribune have printed the fact that America had broken the Axis' secret code? That was truth and yet every newspaper agreed to hide that success so that fewer Americans would die in battle.

Make a reasonable argument instead of creating an obvious straw man.

Save the bumper sticker talk for your bumper. It's a useful tool that way, for sorting those with whom I might speak from those I'd like to avoid.

Keith Olbermann recently ran a piece with about 8 video clips extending over a couple of years showing Bush crowing "We're followin' the terrorists' money."

As many talking heads have pointed out SWIFT had previously published accounts of the surveillance in its newsletter and on its website.

And, it seems, most analysts assume El Qaeda "knows" their transactions are being traced.

So, where's the "treason?"

Republicans have been bashing the press for decades. Remember the "nattering nabobs of negativism," and the "effete corps of impudent snobs" classics, whose writers are still around and both working in the press?

And don't forget, even with their appointees on the high court, the cons are still bashing "activist judges."

It is government's job to make sure people don't go splodey dope in a Sbarro's in middle America. The SWIFT (It's an acronym so it gets all caps. See?) program was helping toward that end.

I think I speak for most Brits when I say I'm glad James Bond and the rest of MI5 broke the law trying to stop the use of nukes and other WMD. The same is true when the CIA broke laws of other countries to stop the transfer of weapons technology.

They gave gov't officials the opportunity to demonstrate whether printing this information would compromise national security. In the editors' judgment, it didn't, and I'm still not seeing what's so shocking about this program that it needed to be kept silent.

It's impossible to evaluate this in full because none of us know how many things editors have learned about that they've opted not to print.

Trust the Times? This is the organization that thought the leakers of Plame's identity should be prosecuted because the disclosure supposedly impaired national security, but apparently do not feel the same way about the leakers of SWIFT stuff, which actually did impair national security. Yeah, I trust them.

I wonder who is in charge there. Does the Board of Directors of the Times support this?

The fact that the Times' NSA story was published concurrently with a splashy book by the author of the article could lead one to think that "trust" is not a good basis for accepting the paper's editorial judgements.

There is, of course, one way to discourage the Times from publishing national security secrets. It would be to simply turn off the subscription.

I wonder how may people, wailing about damage to national security, still waddle down to the end of the driveway to pick up the blue bag.

Part of their problem is that the NYT is so obviously obsessed with taking down Bush and Cheney, that their objecctivity is suspect. Their behavior during the 2004 election doesn't help their cause - from obsessing about abu Ghraib and Bush's TANG record for months, without questioning why Kerry's discharge was so delayed (and ignoring whether he served even one day of his equivalent Naval Reserve committment), up through the Labor Day Surprise (that backfired). Needless to say, this continued through the Wilson article and their heated insistance that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate the Plame "outing".

So, the NYT editors have repeatedly listened to the Administration and concluded that they hadn't made a case that the NYT disclosing programs would harm those programs. Is it any surprise that many question their objectivity?

And, as pointed out above, the question isn't about covering up Administration venality, but rather, about the Administration trying to protect relatively successful programs.

I think most of us value a deeply skeptical, if not adversarial press, but at the end of the day we expect good judgment.

A wiser Keller might have reasoned something like this: "Ya know I don't really trust these bastards, but this program appears to be legal and effective and classified. Maybe it will help get the bad guys. Let's take a pass for now."

Unless I'm mistaken, one can only commit treason if one's intention is to betray the country. Surely no sane person thinks that this is what the NYT intended.

We're all worried about their decision to print the story in question. It may have been bad judgment, but it's clearly not treason. That's a very serious term, incidentally, that should be reserved for very serious offenses.

There is also the public's right to not know, and mine has been repeatedly violated by Pinch & gang.

They're stringing out this war, which they are ostensibly against, creating more of the bloodshed they want you to believe they abhor, and doing it all as the functioning house organ of a Democratic party that lost its mind in Florida 2000.

I can imagine the scene in the office during "a respectful hearing," the cartoon blurb over Keller's head reading "I'm going to bury you, Chimpy!"

For all the posters who say that the disclosure was of no effect, I refer you to this analysis, which points out that several big terrorists were captured by the SWIFT program after it was outed in a UN report. So maybe they didn't get the memo--thank goodness the NYT apprised them of this nefarious scheme--or they are indeed stupid.

"Unless I'm mistaken, one can only commit treason if one's intention is to betray the country"

Well, the Constitution says treason consists of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy", but if you think there's some emanation there about intentionality, maybe there is. There certainly could be some such in statute law, of course...

This government has been spying on gay college students, solely because they oppose don't ask, don't tell. That's pretty disgusting if you ask me.

http://www.gay.com/news/election/article.html?2006/02/06/3

Under what authority does the government have the permission to mine the SWIFT Database? Under what law? While well intentioned, there is ample argument that it was an illegal action by the government. That's nice that they declare it to be "successful", but how do we really know that? Because they say so? Bush publicly declared that the government was going to mine financial data of terrorists back in 2002.

Thank goodness the New York Times printed this. I'm very interested when the government is breaking the law, even if it is for "good" reasons. If you don't want to trust the New York Times, then don't read it. I'm glad I have that information at my fingertips now though.

As a gay person, I'm a hell of a lot more scared of the government invading my privacy rights than I am of some terrorists trying to kill me (which IS a real threat - but it is quite small). And I live in New York.

I realize that most Americans don't give a hoot about privacy, liberty, and freedom. They don't care that our government tortures people. But I do, and sorry, that doesn't make me a terrorist.

"As Baquet and Keller put it: "They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes." Government officials are biased toward suppressing things that make them look bad, and the press needs to bring out the full story, so that citizens can exercise the independent judgment that is crucial to democracy."

Now try this:

"As Bush and Cheney put it: "The MSM and the press want to protect their secrets, and they want to trumpet their successes." The MSM and the press are biased toward suppressing things that make them look bad, and the government needs to bring out the full story so that citizens can exercise the independent judgment that is crucial to democracy."

Isn't it ironic that public scrutiny works both ways? What the press and the government overlook is that the point is the public's interest in being informed. I'm tired of both parties guarding their own turfs so jealously that no one wins and the public always loses.

In the SWIFT matter, I'm not happy that the original leakers and the NYT decided to play gotcha with the Bush Administration on this issue, but the government should aggressively investigate and prosecute the leaks. If it doesn't, we'll know once again that while the Bush Administration fears the MSM and the press, it certainly doesn't fear the public.

Winston; I stick by my assertion that this is treason. It is couched behind the obfuscation that the public, which includes the terrorists, has a right to know.

The New York Times is actively engaged in undermining the principles, integrity, and success of the the U.S. Additonal motivation for this venality is it's looming failure as a media outlet. Through web logs more and more Americans are getting their information from each other and not the GOD figure NYT/LAT etc, sermonizing the rabble from the Temple Mount.

What we are witnessing is a cultural change that is supremely democratic in nature but not related to the Democrats. Look at the entire picture, connect the dots, and the clues all add up.

The GWOT is not a study of discreet parts but a mosaic of actions that only make sense when viewed as a whole.

CUZE;

DAD is correct and you are not. Using the FBI/CIA to back up your assertions won't work since they are the source of the leaks we are talking about. There is a faction in both of these bureaucracies that have a vested interest in defeating the current administration no matter what the cost to American security.

DTL, maybe you are able to feel little-threatened by terrorism because for several years now you have been well-protected from terrorists?

If the universal dread of Americans on 9-12-01, that the WTC was the first attack and there would surely be more, had materialized (rather than slowly faded thru time and a successful forward-defense), do you think you would elevate your--or anyone else's--special-interest cultural grievance over the life-and-limb preservation of your countrymen--and your self?

Regardless, its funny how those who declaim the allegedly treasonous outing of Mrs. Wilson who, by all records, was hardly under cover are generally the same folks celebrating the NY and LA Times efforts to arm America's enemies with information necessary to kill more Americans.

At best one might think this simply political, but you should understand why some of us think their patriotism has no more integrity than a street hooker's chastity.

You fail to note that the Wall Street Journal also broke this story. Why leave that paper out of your critique? Might it be because it's a conservative paper? Have WSJ editors yet explained their rationale?

Please don't even suggest that I have an ounce of patriotism in my body. I don't. That's insulting.

All in all, while I like this country, there are some things wrong with it. And I don't think that our country is morally superior to all others. There are lots of decent countries in this world, some of which are better than this country.

When this country has faults - I have zero qualms pointing them out. Our country will be better off for it.

Again - people are so stupid that they equate criticism with the government for support of terrorism. The insinuation is that because I criticize Bush I must therefore love the terrorists. How silly. I have quite frequently stated my disgust for the Islamo-Fascists. And I supported both the Afghan and the Iraq War quite vocally.

David implies that gay people should support Bush, because he's not knocking walls down on us. Again - that's insulting to the intelligence of gay people, insisting that we tolerate crap, because it could be worse. Give me a break.

But I still expect the President to follow the law. And if he doesn't like the law, then Congress should pass a new one. Again - that doesn't make me a terrorist.

I, for one, have just initiated a subscription to the New York Times. I usually read the Wall Street Journal, but I thought I'd show my support to the Times.

Jacques, and the Editors of the New York Times would like everyone to overlook this crucial paragraph in the WSJ editorial:

Around the same time, Treasury contacted Journal reporter Glenn Simpson to offer him the same declassified information. Mr. Simpson has been working the terror finance beat for some time, including asking questions about the operations of Swift, and it is a common practice in Washington for government officials to disclose a story that is going to become public anyway to more than one reporter. Our guess is that Treasury also felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times, which was pushing a violation-of-privacy angle; on our reading of the two June 23 stories, he did.

It serves The Times interests to pretend that their stories were the same and that there was no genuine difference in their sources. Such was not the case. Once again, The Times chooses to rewrite the facts to suit its ends.

Are you capable of posting anything without calling people names or making derrogatory comments about them? Must you always resort to attacking the person instead of the argument? How old are you Jacques? Your posts don't reflect well on your maturity or ability to make reasoned arguments!

synova: You hit the nail on the head! The WSJ says that is exactly what happened and that they were contacted by the Treasury Dept. once the Treasury Dept. was informed that the New York Times was going with the story.

Having criticized the New York Times for their decision to publish, and their subsequent misrepresentation of the facts while defending that decision, I believe that those who claim that The Times editors' actions were treasonous are wrong.

Downtownlad,By your reasoning, we should reveal every secret the government, military, CIA, FBI has in order that not one gay person should be investigated? You must have more faith than I in the invincibility of the nation.

Maybe its just that I was raised by Watergate-era Democrats, but I'm not inclined to trust the government. This administration in particular has abused my trust by creating secret torture prisons and starting a war (a war I supported) on what turned out to be false pretenses. I think we need to win the war in Iraq, but what they did was shameful, and between that and the covert torture and Valerie Plame, I'm sorry, but I don't trust these guys any further than I could throw them.

Tidalpoet - That is a false dichotomy. Leaving aside the trustworthiness of elected officials (which is dubious at best in most cases), 99.99% of the military/intelligence apparatus is unelected. What they do is TOTALLY opaque. That's necessary in a lot of ways, but it also creates situations where career bureaucrats can abuse our faith in their discretion.

Terry--I found your 1:17 post interesting; You certainly have ample reason not to trust elected politicians, but at least in the context of this thread, the elected politicians are the only ones that are accountable in some fashion to the public when they stand for election.

The NYT is accountable only to the Sulzberger family; the career bureaucrats, those that you rightly point out are not accountable, are precisely the ones the are leaking this information. And none of us know their motives for leaks; they remain hidden; they subvert the political process and the will of the electorate, when they leak information that damages any administration. Unless they were honest enough to come forward and provide the information openly, they are precisely the ones in the whole shabby affair, I have the least confidence in.

JC made a statement in an earlier comment that I had trouble understanding:

"And Hamdan's use of Youngstown certainly seems to have a big ramification on Ann's vaunted totalitarian executive theory."

I am impressed that JC took the time to read the nearly 200 pages of the entire round of Hamdan opinions.

I somehow missed Justice Stevens heavy reliance on Youngstown.

As I read the opinion, it looked to me that he spent most of his time distinguishing Quirin, Yamashita and Eisentrager, the cases relied on by the US. Perhaps I missed something. Care to enlighten me on how you think Stevens relied on Youngstown, JC?

On another subject, it impressed me that the arguments for Hamdan that carried the day were made by Hamdan's appointed counsel, a senior Naval JAG Officer. It was yet another impressive demonstration that our military justice system still is the one of the best (if not the best) in the world.

Not every financial insitution is affiliated with SWIFT. Now terrorists know not to use the ones that are.

Some of you have said "Bush said we were following the money, so the Ne York Times didn't disclose anything". But now people know which specific financial institutions were involved in helping to follow the money.

How is this different from "FDR says we're cracking the Axis codes, so it doesn't matter if we print that we've specifically cracked the Enigma machine"?

Are you too stupid to distinguish between the generic and the specific? Can you not tell the difference between "we've got undercover cops on the case" and "we've got three undercover cops, here are their names and badge numbers"?

"But not to worry, after getting slammed for daring to attempt to catch terrorists using our NSA data mining program, and surveillance of financial transactions, we are now working on mind reading techniques. That of course will take some time....UPDATE III July 1st: The inimitable Ann Althouse pens a must read"

I have seen nothing about Lt. Cdr. Swift being punished for his spectacular legal work.

The following quote comes from this cite:

http://www.underthesamesun.org/content/2005/06/

"I started telling people about Navy Lt. Commander Charles Swift.

Lieutenant Commander Swift, a military lawyer, you see, was assigned to defend Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who served as a driver for Osama bin Ladin. Hamdan was charged before the kangaroo military commissions set up by the Pentagon to try to provide a sense of legitimacy to the detentions in Guantanamo and elsewhere. People like Mr. Hamdan were charged first with the hopes that, finding it impossible to mount a plausible defense, they would plead guilty, in return for reduced time. Their participation, it was hoped, would make the process appear somewhat acceptable, if not perfect.

Commander Swift and other military lawyers, however, put a stop to that charade. They launched a vigorous defense, going all the way up to the Supreme Court -- even filing lawsuits in civilian courts in their own names on behalf of their clients who have no such access. They challenged every aspect of the process, from the judges, to the rules of evidence, to the tribunals themselves. They maintained that their clients had the right to presumption of innocence, just like everyone else, and that the charges against them would have to proven, not assumed. (In fact, Mr. Hamdan maintains he was just a driver for hire trying to make a living.)

Cmdr. Swift and others persisted, and remarkably, they have torn apart the whole sham -- very deservedly so. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld produced a stunning loss to the administration as Judge James Robertson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that President Bush “had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions in establishing military commissions to try detainees at the United States naval base here as war criminals.” Cmdr. Swift and other military lawyers have been traveling at home and abroad, openly and loudly denouncing the military commission system as illegitimate, unfair and unacceptable.

People gasp with disbelief as they ponder these American career military lawyers, randomly assigned to defend people their government has designated as terrorists and locked up without charges, during a process clearly designed to provide not justice but a fig-leaf show-trial, taking on the executive branch so boldly and openly. How many countries, I ask, produce men of such integrity in their armed forces who would actually defend Osama Bin Ladin’s driver as a client innocent until proven guilty? Would you, I ask? Yes, there is a very ugly, cruel side to U.S. foreign policy and imperialism, but there is also this."

As this is not a right wing site, I suspect there would have been something said about "punishment" were that happening to Commander Swift.

If you have some evidence that this is happening, I, for one, would be the first to volunteer to find the best legal counsel in the country to assist him on a pro bono basis.

I think the timing of the phases of the war in conjunction with the 2004 election tempted the entire NYTimes brain trust into deciding to brand the war as "Bush's War" and then do a Vietnam on it and the president.

Now, having politicized it with such great alacrity, the brain trust feels that it must avoid the onus of having stupidly handed Bush a serendipitous political victory.

Facts such as, Bush never wanted to--and tried hard not to--politicize what should have been a all-in national effort, and that the war is existential and over the future of the way the world will be, and that the enemy are true cutthroats deploying lethal combinations of religious dogma, petro-wealth, and exploitable regional rivalries, are all mere secondary trifles when compared to the glitter, glamor, prestige, and power of winning back that White House.

I think this is about as deep as it goes. Alas, the imbalance between the grave and the banal seems beyond the appreciation of the little anointed hippie, Pinch.

Buddy Larsen: I cannot put my finger on it, but I recently read a piece that said LCDR Swift was retiring after 20 years because he had been passed over for promotion. Being passed over in the service for promotion is not a punishment. I am sure that Mr.Swift will assume his place in pantheon along side Rick Shenseki (who was not in fact punished, but whose term of Chief of Staff had expired).

You implied you had read the opinion. I did not need to google, because I had read it.

I made a statement about the opinion questioning your quote about Youngstown.

You took the bait and continued comment as if you had read the opinion.

Adam called you on it and you blame me?

Sorry it won't work, lad.

And your point about Swift's "punishment" is not well taken. I am sure he realized when he took on the Hamdan defense as a Senior JAG officer that trial work would not help in the promotion race. As someone said in the story, he did not get his ticket punched in the right boxes for promotion. When an officer works on one case for a long period of time he cannot be doing other things.

I am pretty sure he made his decisions with his eyes open.

He can now write his ticket in civilian life. $500k plus per year (what he will likely be offered with a large law firm) is scarcely "punishment".

Swift's first supervisor at the Office of Commissions was Col. Will Gunn, who said Friday that he gave Swift two annual fitness reports and "I gave him very high ratings overall."

Asked whether he thought politics might have played a role in Swift being bypassed for promotion, Gunn focused on Swift's atypical career as a military lawyer. "Charlie has spent a lot of time as a litigator, a trial advocate. That's really unusual in the JAG. You find that people in the more senior ranks have moved around and proved themselves in a variety of settings."

Most of Swift's career has been spent in the courtroom.

"While Charlie is a brilliant guy, a tenacious litigator, he does not have all the blocks checked like some other folks have," Gunn said. He called it a "breadth-of-experience" issue.

Okay, you've slipped into the repetitive personal preening that has wrecked previous threads. I am forced to delete most of your comments because of this. It's not all about you. Whenever you succeed in making it about you, I will destroy the evidence that you have. I let you go for a while but you abused my hospitality. Next time, I won't give a reason. I will just destroy. So remember the reason.

Please, don't talk to him. You are giving him what he wants. Sorry to delete the work of generally good commenters, but you've got to stop letting the troll make the thread about him. Check the original post again for the actual subject matter.

As Bob Wright - no fan of President Bush - has pointed out, while Al Qaeda may at one time have had a hierarchical corporate structure, today it is decentralized, and is more akin to a "brand" than an organization exhibiting top-down control (and if the "brand" analogy goes too far, in any case many Al Qaeda cells have considerable operational independence.)

One consequence of this is that both knowledge and the decision to use particular tactics or methods of operation cannot be imputed to "Al Qaeda" generally. Thus, comments to the effect the "the terrorists" or "Al Qaeda" had to know about the SWIFT and the surveillance of SWIFT are off the mark. Maybe some in Al Qaeda knew (but likely very few, as many bankers don't know about SWIFT), but that says nothing about others in AL Qaeda who would make monitored international money transfers.

The NY Times deliberately damaged our security and aided the enemy. That might not have been the specific intention of the principals involved, but the law (and moral common sense) teaches us that individuals are responsible for the natural and probable consequences of their acts.

Keller and Co. are morally repulsive people, and they should face some kind of consequence for their conduct, if only to deter repeat performances by themselves and others.

Comments on the Hamdan case seemed tangentially relevant to the general question of executive authority to instituted programs designed to "connect dots" and smoke out potential domestic terrorism while it is in its planning stages here and overseas.

I was trying to squash the Youngstown argument, and got off on a tangent of my own.

The NYT and its followers want to make their case against the current administration from both directions. If the steps it takes are deemed ineffective, they are "inept". If it takes steps that are acknowledged to be effective, it is implied to be imposing on our privacy.

During WWI, WWII and Korea, all fought under Democrat administrations, there was actual overt censorship, which was generally accepted by most Republicans and all but the fringes of each end of the political spectrum.

Sad to say that we cannot pull together that way today.

Strangely, I think the Hamdan case might encourage a consensus at least in Congress.

So absurd...it totally bypasses the contents of their own reporting (no expressly critcized illegalities; checks in place and multiple examples of it's effectiveness) as well as ignoring the responsibilities that come with their job as "government watchdogs."

I work for a small newspaper in California and they published an editorial this week in support of the Times' decision to publish. They likewise relied on the "Government can't be trusted," logic while ignoring questions of responsibility or any of the excellent points raised by Heather MacDonald in her piece at The Weekly Standard.

Just because the potential for abuse exists, as MacDonald points out, doesn't mean that it is actually occuring. Risen and Lichtblau made it clear that there was no abuse actively occuring in the SWIFT program yet they were convinced it needed to be exposed. There was no good reason for it.

Keller cited the public interest, yet he nor Risen and Lichtblau nor anyone else in the week since has made anything resembling a strong case as to what that compelling public interest actually was.

The New York Times isn't going anywhere. "Almost everything that most people hold dear?" Please, that's just empty rhetoric. The New York Times has broken a lot of important stories over the years, and along with the Washington Post did this country a great service with its publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Deep Throat-inspired Watergate coverage, and so forth. It was also did a lot to publicize the civil rights movement when most major papers were still ignoring it. Once in a while, it will make a mistake, but if the Bush administration had the New York Times Editorial Board's track record in making these sort of judgment calls then we'd all be in a better off.

You're a career civil service worker. Your boss gives you an order that is against the law. If you blow the whistle, your career is ruined, and if you don't obey the order, you get fired. What else are you supposed to do? I salute the New York Times for going public with this information. I would rather err on the side of telling the public too much than not telling them enough.

Also, I doubt the terrorists failed to realize that the government was tracking their telephone calls and their financial records -- governments have been doing that since at least World War II. I don't know of any Democrats who object to them doing it. Its the way they choose to go about doing it, however, which is unduly intrusive, lacks judicial oversight, and allows the government to invade people's privacy for the sake of humiliating their political opponents (its happened) that bothers us. The press annoys me at times, but it is the only thing that keeps the government on its toes.

How did this story impair the operations? I keep reading that assertion, but there's no follow up on exactly how. There have also been numerous statements that we would trace the money that finances terrorism, going back to right after Sept. 11, so how is this a surprise? What terrorist hasn't known this? There's nothing so far to persuade me that printing this story has in any way hampered our efforts to fight terrorism.

You're a good defender, Terry. But you can't generalize away the current level of politicization of programs that most people wish would be left to the province of the war-fighting duties of the government, so long as the war is on and the government has to fight active foreign enemies in the field.

"One consequence of this is that both knowledge and the decision to use particular tactics or methods of operation cannot be imputed to "Al Qaeda" generally."

That's correct, and if the history of the European terrorists of the '60s is any indication, the terrorists of today are similarly hindered by the fact that it takes two people on the outside to support one person in hiding, with money, safe houses, travel, and information about what the police are planning next. The Euro police in the '60s broke the back of the successor groups by going after their lines of support. Today it would be a program such as SWIFT.

Yes, the NYT has broken a lot of important stories over the years. But, for example, the Pentagon Papers was 30 years ago. This is today. Looking at what the paper has done in the last couple of years is far more relevant than what it did 30+ years ago.

The fact that the NYT breaks a story doesn't make it good that it was broken. And the fact that it had noble intent 30 years ago doesn't mean that it has noble intent today.

As I noted above, its motives are highly suspect because of its apparent crusade against the current Administration. If it hadn't tried so hard to take Bush and Cheney down over the years, and esp. during the 2004 campaign, then it might have more credability in claiming that it objectively looked at the government's claims, and then rejected them. Rather, because its objectivity is so suspect, it appears to many that this was done primarily to hurt the Administration, and not for some high handed noble purpose.

As for the idea that people should be immune from prosecution for violating the law, because they might lose their jobs if they complained, you really have nothing to back yourself up on this. We don't know who leaked to the NYT, and so can't say whether or not they might have been fired if they whistle blew.

Besides, there are prescribed ways to whistle blow as to this sort of information, and the NYT is not included. If they had gone through their IG, and the to Congress, then, fine. They didn't, rather, they violated the law and their oath, going straight to the NYT.

Finally, on this subject, you are positing civil disobedience. But for an ordered society, that requires being willing to pay the price of the disobedience. Anonymous leaking to the NYT doesn't show this willingness to pay the presecribed price, but rather, the willingness to avoid it at all costs.

Blowing the whistle might hold back the promotions. However, blowing the whistle will not get you fired. In order to get fired from a civil service job you really have to mess up and it is almost impossible to mess up that badly. If you are convinced that a program is wrong, there are all sorts of ways to blow the whistle short of publishing in the major newspapers. You have thecivil service hierarchy itself, you have the ability to bring it to the congressional commitees, you have the ability to bring it to the department heads and state your case. None of these involve the publishing of secret documents and the destruction of legal and worthy programs that safeguard the country.

Why did the leakers choose to go to the NY Times with this information? The easy answer would be trying to destroy the current administration. That is probably the right answer too, otherwise the other options open to the leakers would have been used. If the leakers did do this to bring down the administration, then they should be prosecuted to the full limits of the law. Personally I think the NY Times should be too. For them to decide that they alone have the right to determine whether something should be secret or is a valuable tool to bring down the terrorists or not is pure hubris. When they also state that the program is valuable and they still print the story, that is even worse. For them then to say that the government did not try hard to dissuade them from printing, which they did, when the president, vice president, secretary of treasury, intelligence chief, head of the 9/11 commission and the leaders of the congressional commitees tasked with oversight of the program from both parties ask them not to print the story, it is a little hard to justify saying the government did not try hard. The more the Times protests, the worse they look.

I'm sorry you find your nation's existence so painful. Might you move to one more accommodating to your aesthetics?

Anyway, even the editors of the NY and LA Times concede the SWIFT program was legal. Deafening is the silence coming from capitol hill Democrats defending the Times' releasing of this secret and lawful program targeting the efforts of America's enemies to finance killing more Americans.

Renew your subscription to those who aid and abet America's enemies as you will, but spare us the nonsense about celebrating who they are. They've done no one but America's enemies any favors, and it is disingenuous in the extreme to assert otherwise.

Porter Goss not long ago made a huge deal of how badly the leaks hamper our ability to work internationally against the enemy organizations.

We can take the position that we don't believe Goss, or Bush, or any of the like-minded current & former principals commenting across the spectrum, but that would mean ignoring many lifetime records of public service integrity in favor of believing the press's own vague imputations of anti-press political motives for the outcry.

Do we need, in order to ask NYTimes to quit doing this stuff, to see foreign intelligence operatives stepping forward by name and affiliation, to say that, the hell with it, they're through working with this administration because it can't keep its secrets?

It's not just NSA and SWIFT, remember--it's the "torture gulag" and "secret CIA flights" (replete with flight schedules and aircraft IDs) and hundreds upon hundreds of front page Abu Graib and the like stories, invariably de-contexted and de-proportionalized--and that's just for starters.

There's also the other side of the ledger; the stories that the "All The News That Fits" folks can never find reason to fit.

SWIFT was first revealed in a UN report in 2002. Yet several major terrorists have been captured since then by SWIFT, so obviously they didn't all "already know anyway." They sure do now, though. Now a legal and effective tool is now possibly rendered ineffective, and the bad guys take heart at our divisions.

Thing is, we can never know exactly what tripped up a terrorist, except in retrospect. The argument boils down to, once again, those who feel comfortable waiting for that eventuality, in order to preserve some possible privacy intrusion, and those who don't.

You took one side comment and ran this post? For the main course, see what I quoted from the oped over at Angrybear. Ann - if your readers choose only to read what you quoted and not the whole oped, they will be miselad as to what the editors said. Was this your (dishonest) intent or did you not read very deeply? If you wish to make a point - why be so misleading?

1. LCDR Swift. I would posit that VNJAGVET and myself (former officer, married to a senior JAG officer) know a bit about military justice. Beyond the points already made, one should understand that JAG defense counsels report to senior JAG defense supervisors, not to the local commander or local prosecutors. So the folks that do his Efficiency report are relatively in synch with his. A LCDR (O-4) is a junior rank for a lawyer. They used to enter the service at O-3 and now do so at O-2. Swift's career had other problems long before this case.

2. I thought that the NYT was a bit disingenuous with this section.

Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people."

Perhaps Ann can shed light on the case, but as I understood the multiple opinions, the majority was against pre-publication censorship, but one could infer that a majority thought that the press could be prosecuted AFTER the fact for disclosure of secrets if the government desired. No government since has had the stones to do that.

The leaders of the Congressional committees spoke to the Times saying that they had been briefed on this program. SWIFT is not something you hire. SWIFT is a messaging system. Your financial institution creates messages in the SWIFT format based on the type of transaction this is and sends it out to the SWIFT messaging network. SWIFT made an agreement with the US to check the messages. This was audited by KPMG and also by the SWIFT auditors themselves. This is something that SWIFT does when it tracks as the federal government tracks your banking transactions now for IRS purposes. What is with your hiring of some group without oversight. Congress has oversight. The treasury department has oversight. The results which meet the specifications agreed upon by the SWIFT network and the US are turned over to the intelligence community for further investigation.

In addition to working with the US, SWIFT also works with INTERPOL and the various governmental groups throughout the world.

You really need to get off your idea that everything is an infringement of your privacy beyond what is already done by the government and has been for years.

Thanks for the replies; at this point, I'm still not convinced that this story was ended the effectiveness of Swift. Buddy, we'll have to disagree on credibility. I do give lifetime public servants a lot of credence, but it's tempered by doubts about the political aims of this administration. I'm not a whit disturbed by revelations about Abu Graib, for example. Who shouldn't be ashamed by pictures of naked prisoners, hogtied, and being made to shove a banana up their ass? I'm not sure what context could excuse that. People on the right mission can do very wrong things in its pursuit, and exposing those things is an effective check.

The issue of whether the Times was wrong on this count is fairly up for debate. Any move to punish or restrict the press, though, as a result of it, I'll see as dangerous and unacceptable. It will just be one step toward justifying greater and more numerous restraints on media of all types, and we have to hold firm against that.

AJDIt appears that the WSJ was given the story by the Administration AFTER the NYT had told that it was going to run it, AFTER listening to all the reasons not to. Thus, the WSJ running the story is a red herring, as there is no indication that it would have run the story on its own, if the NYT had not already announced to the govt. that it was doing so.

The newsroom--not just the editorials--produces a daily dose of delegitimization of this president and every policy initiative or world event reaction the administration produces.

"News" is pretty malleable, and NYT is masterfully notorious for the downplay or the bury where something might help the pres, and equally adept the other way on anything that can be slanted against him. "All The News That Fits" (the agenda).

Specific cases? Can't even scratch the surface in a comments section.

Take a look into archives at www.timeswatch.org and see what ya think.

And, the partisanship wouldn't bother me in the least if I didn't think it's helping the enemy and prolonging the war and generally sacrificing the interests of the nation in return for partisan political advantage.

I just want 'em to back off a hair until this war winds down, so that we don't in a few years have an AQ counterpart to Gen Giap of the NVA telling us how we were defeated only by our own selves.

It's a matter of exigency and degree (see the press models of our successful wars), and other than that I agree wholeheart with all your feelings about free press and accountable government.

AJD, if you'll scroll up the comments here, you'll see a series of posts that utterly debunk your WSJ notion.

The Pentagon Papers case would seem to be in favor of prosecution of the NYT here, not against it. It was a 6-3 decision against an injuction prohibiting publication, with the justification being "prior restraint". At least two of the Justices (White & Stewart) voting with the majority though stated in dicta in a concurring opinion that it would have been ok to prosecute the NYT, just not enjoin them against publication. Indeed, 18 USC 798 was mentioned in this concurrance, which specifically prohibits publication of signals intelligence information.

So, while the case does not stand for the proposition that it is ok to prosecute the press under the espionage statutes, it is very much suggested that a majority of that Court would have approved such.

Sorry if my last post on the Pentagon Papers Case (New York Times v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971)) was a bit muddy. The problem is that even though a case may say something, it may not stand for that proposition. In particular, dicta, which is stuff that isn't directly relevant to the findings in a case, doesn't officially count.

In this case, the issue was the injunction. The statement by White (with Stewart) that the government could have prosecuted the NYT under the espionage laws instead was dicta because it was not directly relevant to whether the government could get that injunction.

The result is that, because it was dicta, it is not binding precedent, but rather is merely suggestive.

There is more than just national security a risk regarding these leaks, but the ability of the government to cooperate with its citizens in general. If CIA leakers and the press that publishes the leaks go unpunished, what will prevent some IRS agent with an agenda from leaking private information about companies or individuals? What will prevent regulators from leaking trade secrets or politically charged information. Why should companies or individuals cooperate at all with the government knowing that federal employees can and will leak with impunity (without this kind of cooperation the government would not be able to operate effectively.

There was a Wall Street Journal story the other day regarding Barclay's bank and tax arbitrage transactions that seems to contain inside information Was information on this story leaked by an IRS agent because the agent doesn't like big banks?

Bush needs to prosecute the leakers aggressively and maybe the press as well to restore confidence in our government that it can keep a secret. Right now the conventional wisdom is that it cannot keep any secrets.

Tim's probably one of those people who lives in a Trailer Park in Alabama, paranoid that terrorists are going to hunt him down there and kill him.

What a wimp.

I live in New York City and I'm not going to let some terrorists destroy my way of life. I don't need George Bush to "protect" me. The 9/11 attacks already prove that he's incompetent when it comes to making this country safe.

I'm tired of people who don't live in a terrorist prone area (i.e. 95% of this country) telling New Yorkers (who DO live in a terrorist prone area) that they know how to make us safe.

Bullshit. Go buy a freaking condo next to the Empire State building and live there before I should take you wimps seriously.

Hmm, so you're pretty impressed with yourself. Well, that's fine - I've seen no shortage of folks in my life who think every last thing is about them - but eventually life catches up to them and the smart one figure it out. And I know I'm not alone in that observation. Regardless, you and people like you really aren't my concern, at all. But there is a nation the rest of us do care about far outside the extreme myopia of midtown or Soho or tribeca or Chelsea or the upper east side or the meatpacking district or whatever or wherever the likes of you and your ilk reside - and your little small minded newspaper with its dwindling subscriptions and declining equities panders to those who hate America and puts the rest of us and our nation's interest at risk. You and yours can trust them all you want - but the rest of us recognize them for who they are and what they do - so we won't. What's ironic about the whole thing is that we'll probably survive the Times' ill-disclosure of the lawful program to disrupt terrorist finances - but the Times' reputation will not. Even more ironic is that Times' actions, like the Hamdan decision, will most likely benefit Bush and the Republicans in the upcoming elections in ways those cheering both will not begin to comprehend until Thanksgiving.

Terry, the story tells which banks are involved, which types of transactions, and lots more details that are I'm sure already coming in extremely useful to terrorists in avoiding it. The program is pretty much useless in it's current form and will require a long, long time to restructure. Hopefully Keller won't feel the need to sell more newspapers between now and then.

I am not quite sure what you mean by that the NYT was responsible to its readers. Are you suggesting that this is a greater good than the American people? That the NYT readership is somehow representative of the American People?

I am also not quite sure how you are suggesting that market forces should be and are interacting with this paper's decision to publish, in the face of repeated insistances by the Administration, the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, etc.

Part of the problem with bringing in the market here is that the NYT is not doing that well right now, either in terms of market or in terms of stock price. The Sulzberger family has control of the paper, regardless of how well it does as a business, in terms of circulation, etc., by owning all of the voting shares of stock.

I think that you also have to take into account the demographics of the paper's circulation here. My understanding is that about half is local (NYC), and the rest is national. But there is no indication that at least the national portion of this circulation is the least bit representative of the population as a whole. And, so, there is no indication that they would abandon the Gray Lady if she were publishing the specifications to our nuclear arsonel. Rather, there is some indication that they might buy a bunch of guest subscriptions for their friends.

I guess then, I am asking you to be a bit more specific, and point out to us, or at least to me, how you think that the market should or is policing the NYT's actions here.

At any rate, "trusting the market" as a concept is pretty much limited to judging the efficiency of the exchange of goods and services. The concept in itself has no moral component. If the topic here is the NYTimes' citizenship, would the terms of debate change per its subscription numbers?

It's becoming clearer to me that there is no secret about the war that the NY Times might reveal which would not be acceptable to its defenders. If one opposes the war, as the NY Times surely does, there is literally nothing it can do to offend the like-minded, save for supporting the administration.

Any honest reading of this most recent NY Times story must admit that at least it might, not certainly but might result in making the work of terrorists against the US and other nations easier. Any other reading is dishonest, blindly partisan, or lacks imagination.

I don't have time for the market to decide whether it likes when the NY Times acts against the country's interests. (Nor does anyone) It's sales receipts are simply immaterial to the problem at hand.

We must decide we're at war, or we are not. And act accordingly. Getting people killed just to prove your moral superiority is asinine and evil.

Dick - I did not know KPMG was auditing the accounting. Good. But KPMG is not in the same business as our Courts or our Congress in terms of monitoring whether our civil liberties are being properly protected. I thought the latter was the point.

Elizabeth--I think it was me who suggested the NYT is accountable only to the Sulzbergers. With respect to your market argument, I side with Bruce Hayden above with respect to the Time's very narrow market share and readership profiles. In fact, I would suggest the Times published the SWIFT piece precisely to keep hold of that specific market.

My comment was more with respect to the NYT as a corporation; if I am not mistaken, there are no Class A stockholders outside the Sulozberger family; thus, I meant to argue that there was no larger shareholder mechanism to act as a check.

**) Whatever we surrender, can either be retrieved at the ballot box, or not, depending on what is surrendered and to whom.

***) If we want to trade, say, 100% purity of full and maximum readings of civil liberty for, say, AQ control of OPEC, then we should understand the consequences likely to flow from the latter, by assigning probabilities ranging from nothing to world war on the WWII scale, over global resources that are currently allocated by open and transparent markets.

What do you mean, PGL, by the notion of having the courts monitor this program? I'm sure the lawyers here can answer this more fully, but in the real practice of law, subpoenas are issued pro forma by a clerk. The person served with one has the right to try to quash the subpoena if he thinks it's not lawful. Judges never see a majority of subpoenas issued until the time of the hearing.

Do you really think that judges should be sitting around "monitoring" every transaction in SWIFT to make sure no one sees what amounts to the information contained in a tax return? It would take thousands of them!

I agree with Bruce and others who remind us this is not an issue of popularity but of ethics for the NYT to grapple with.

My understanding of this whole situation is that it was an effective program, it was entirely legal, and thanks to the NY Times, it is finished. I don't think the Times should be prosecuted for treason, although I think their behavior in this war has been treasonous. I think they should be squeezed until they give up the leakers in the government, who should be prosecuted.DTL has the luxury of being unpatriotic, thanks to the thousands of patriots who protect his freedom to do so. I vaguely recollect a quote, perhaps from Orwell, about people being able to sleep safely due to the existence of rough men ready to do violence in their defense.

As to Bush protecting us form 9/11, I assume you are referring to the supposed intelligence report of a week before 9/11 that supposedly told us about 9/11. The problem was that the intelligence report said some plane in some city was going to be used in an attack on some target. Now like you I live in NYC, in fact in Queens between LGA and JFK. considering that there are over 4000 flights per day into and out of NYC from 3 major airports from all over the world and the report did not pinpoint the airline, the target, the flight, the source of the flight or what kind of attack it was going to be or when the attack was going to happen anyu closer than a couple of weeks, precisely how did you expect Bush or anyone else to say that it was going to be this particular flight aimed at this particular target on this particular day. Ludicrous. Maybe if Gorelick had not put out the directive that prevented the various agencies from comparing notes the president might have gotten enough information to actually know what was going to happen. As to protecting the city, have yuo been attacked since? If not, thank the city, the police, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the administration, the Defense Department, etc.

As to your other complaints, I did not realize that the administration said we will protect only non-gay citizens from attack; gay citizens are on their own. Could you point us to that directive? In the meantime if you really want to wait for a while until the Islamic jihad wins and takes over, have at it and then when they drop a wall on you you can thank them for sparing your feelings from the terrible things the conservatives were doing to you.

My comment on market forces was intended to point to irony; conservatives only mention the "moral" aspect lacking in the market when the outcomes of free enterprise conflict with conservative goals. Otherwise, it's Katie Bar the Door, and conservatives routinely condemn liberals for intervening in the market with oversights and restrictions.

Buddy, your argument is spelled out beautifully. We diverge on premise 2: I would rather cede some exploitations than change who we are, and what we value. Die on your feet, or live on your knees! In fact, I believe that is a false dilemma, and that we will prevail, while still protecting the rule of law, and of civil liberty. We have these liberties because our founders were convinced that such a system was superior, and naturally sound. When we scramble to cede those liberties in response to threat, we reject those beliefs. I won't support that.

That still leaves the debate over how to view this act by the Times. I think there are sound criticisms of their decision to publish, but none rise to the level of prosecuting the editors, or trying to restrict that particular paper or any other form of press, including the internet.

Then what kind of disclosing secret documents and programs do you think would rise to the level of prosecuting those who tell our enemies all our secret methods of finding those who are trying to destroy our way of life. How many people are you willing to sacrifice to have editors of newspapers decide our national policies of defense? This one will let them find other ways to funnel money without our being able to track it to terrorists who are planning to attack us or our close allies (think Canada, Britain, Spain, Italy, Japan, Bali, Indonesia, Australia, etc). Is that OK with you to fund these initiatives because Bill Keller in his infinite wisdom thought it would not compromise following the trail of money, as his newspaper suggested in Sept 2001? You will not be on your knees but you will be under attack. Is that OK with you?

1,142,464 - that's the number of people who have a voice in this debate that can immediately penetrate the rationalizations of these editors and the unquestioning support they are receiving from their increasingly homogeneous peers. 1,142,464 people have subscriptions to cancel or can otherwise forgo purchasing the NYT.

It's really that simple to me, not least because I am a very simple frog. Reading Ann's post, I find her decision to continue her support of the NYT kind of hard to square with any assignation of gravity to Keller's decision to knee-cap a successful anti-terrorist program.

Does the responsibility for this rest primarily with Keller? My sense of the NYT's coverage of this war has me suspecting that the editor of the NYT is reflecting the values of the institution, not shaping them...

As a New Yorker, I would ask you to please refrain from generalizing about New York City when you are attacking the New York Times. Fox News is also based in New York City, and its executives could also be described as Upper East Side penthouse-dwelling moral idiots completely consumed by self-vanity. Except of course for those who are Westchester County-dwelling moral idiots completely consumed by self-vanity.

Its worth reminding people that there is a difference between something that is classified and something that is secret. Valerie Plame's identity was classified, but it was not a secret. If I didn't know this already, I would have learned it when the administration and its allies responded along the lines of "we didn't know it was classified, but we assumed it wasn't because everybody in Washington knew who she was."

Similarly, these programs. Anybody who's ready a supermarket-checkout-line paperback knows that the government -- in fact most governments -- have these programs in place. I remember not too long ago one of the major newspapers came under attack for publishing the fact that the government tracked terrorists via their cellular phones. If the terrorists didn't already suspect that, then they are so stupid that there is no excuse for them to ever successfully attack us again.

Same goes for banking, which is why terrorists, drug dealers, arms dealers, and so forth have for decades used a combination of cash and Swiss bank accounts to finance their dealings. I highly, highly doubt that many terrorists were caught because we caught them using the ATM at the neighborhood HSBC branch.

The only generalization you can make about New York is that the little targets all yous guys had on your foreheads are a little bigger than they were a week ago. And you pay lots of taxes for the privilege.

Elizabeth, if we were faced with a choice between the Bill of Rights and martial law, at this moment in time I'd agree with you.

But if a few city-busting nukes (or some like thing) went off around the country, plenty of us would gladly cede the war-fighters on our side every tool they could possibly want. Anything, just please stop the terrorists.

And that's the core beef with the attitude exemplified by the NYTimes--it is unnecessarily playing with fire.

NYTimes has no idea whether its leakage is directly helping the terrorists or not (Keller was just on tv--an unusual action--saying as much by not saying the opposite). No one can be sure, and to say you are sure--as Terry nearly does--is just rhetoric and bravado.

It is bad enough, given the paltry vs grave stakes on either side of the question, that they may be helping the enemy.

And outside the arena of direct help, is that even the most rudimentary understanding of human nature can lead to no other conclusion than that such an influential institution so frivolously, voluminously, and freely leaking the administration's war-fighting secrets, must hearten and give hope (AKA "aid & comfort") to the proven and proven-deadly enemies of the nation.

While I think he overplays the depth of his concerns--civil liberties, Congressional oversight, etc.--the Times had other immdeiate remedies, short of running the story.

For example, let's pursue the Congressional oversight concern. Are you telling me that an organization with the Time's connections and clout could not have run that to ground before publishing. Had they clear evidence that the Administration was stonewalling Congress then they not only have a great story, they have a great rationale for running it.

There seems to be a lot of slack being cut to the NYT here, to the extent of assuming that they somehow acted in good faith. I don't believe they act in good faith at all, I think they are against the war, against Bush, and will pursue that agenda without regard to any consequences whatsoever, including their own survival. BDS on an institutional level.Beth, civil liberties are only infringed to the extent necessary to implement the measures needed to protect the public and effectively fight the war. It is not permanent, historically it has never been permanent.

Old dad, exactly. What he does, in effect, is sneak-push you into the shark pool, and as you splash around among the sharks looking for a way out, he explains from poolside that because someday you might possibly have cause to swim there, and because he's certain that you might not get eaten anyway, and because it's good for the country that it sells his newspapers, "why not let's you gamble?"

It's good to debate how far the encroachments on civil rights because of wartime necessity should go. But I must say, the "rule of law" does NOT solve the problem of terrorism.

I think that's the underlying assumption, that if we can somehow apply this exquisite standard of legality to every problem then, poof, it will go away. It assumes partly that our imagined abuse of rights or our racism is the root cause of terrorism.

Again, those who believe that will never be dissuaded, but I prefer to rely on the military and (even secret) government actions as well First the NYT was for SWIFT, now they're against it--it's a political agenda clothed in moralisms.

For example, let's pursue the Congressional oversight concern. Are you telling me that an organization with the Time's connections and clout could not have run that to ground before publishing.

Old Dad, Sen. Feinstein, who's on the Intelligence Committee, said today in an interview with George Stephanopolis that Congress was not briefed on Swift until the Times had informed the administration that it would be running the story.

I think that's the underlying assumption, that if we can somehow apply this exquisite standard of legality to every problem then, poof, it will go away.

Pat, no, that's not my assumption. Sorry to tear down your strawman. My assumption is that we maintain our adherance to law, and to our values, because they are good and right, and give us the moral highground in this fight against Islamist values, which are antithetical to our own. There's no magical "poof," but the further we allow our government to act outside our laws, then the "poof" you hear will be our identity, disappearing.

I'll repeat my question to you. What precisely could they say without breaking more laws about security that would tell you that what the NY Times did endangered our security. Most every proof they could offer would add more info to what was pased to the terrorists already by the Times. You apparently think that until someone proves to you that it endangers security they should just keep printing. What would you classify as proof enough in this type of situation to tell you that what the Treasury Secretary, the President, the VP, Gov Kean of the 9/11 commission, etc said was a danger to the security of the country actually was? The other point was that this money trail is channeled through the Treasury Department. How do you know that the Intelligence Committee was the one that was told about this program and how also do you know that Sen Feinstein was one who should have been briefed. The leaders of the committee involved were the ones briefed. We don't know who they were and we were not told who. I am sure that also there are certain members of the senate and the house who have a history of passing on information to the press (Metzenbaum in the case of the Thomas hearings, Leahy and Rockefeller to the point that Leahy has the nickname of Leaky Leahy). There are just too many things that were not in the story besides the mechanisms the Times did print that we do not know. I think that since the reporters and the Times have told us people in positions who did talk to them and, in the case of Gov Kean specifically, then that should have been enough even for you to accept.

The latest thing that really bothers me is that the Times in their travel section printed the names and direction to the second homes of Rumsfeld and Cheney to the point of even identifying the location of cameras and the stores that the Cheneys and Rumsfelds patronized as well as the photos of Rumsfeld and Cheny homes. What in the world ever possessed them to do this. That would be analogous to printing the name and address of the whole of Congress as well as the home phone numbers. They are really pushing it IMNSHO.

"Old Dad, Sen. Feinstein, who's on the Intelligence Committee, said today in an interview with George Stephanopolis that Congress was not briefed on Swift until the Times had informed the administration that it would be running the story."

Doesn't this seem odd given the Times' defense that hundreds if not thousands allegedly knew of the SWIFT program? And if she did not know, why not?

If the Times was legitmately concerned about Congressional oversight, why did they not first go to Feinstien or another Intelligence Committee member with the "scoop" that the Bushies were once again dodging Congressional over sight?

And if, in fact, that was the case, why did't the Times discern and report that fact as part of the story?

We already have the moral high ground, Elizabeth, and we cannot sacrifice it by utilizing covert activities in a war. We are freer today than ever, despite living through former eras when presidents suspended habeas corpus or shot German saboteurs after they landed. When people start emigrating to Saudi Arabia rather than the US, I'll worry about losing hearts and minds.

I'm just thankful the majority of the American people feel as the majority here feel--the NYT was going after Bush despite the cost-- and legal, successful clandestine operations present no dangers to our civil liberties.

I should add that the perpetual war has been an absolutely brilliant political tactic.

It's worked wonders and will probably work for another two election cycles before Americans tire of a war that has absolutely zero to do with Osama bin Laden.

Enough time to get the Supreme Court filled with right-wingers.

And all these people bragging about "freedom". Funny - the same people who are calling for the execution of the editor of the New York Times keeping talking up how "free" this country is. They can't even understand the irony.

I wonder if these people realize that there are a good dozen countries on this planet that are more "free" than this one. I'd rather compare the United States countries like New Zealand and set our sights high, than to some medieval country like Saudi Arabia.

Fine, the administration hasn't tried to repeal the law. But, it's absolutely inaccurate to say This administration has fired about 50 Arabic translators, simply because they were gay. Yet you say it quite often.

And I'm tired of people propagating the LIE that Clinton pushed for this law.

Anyone with a proper recollection of history knows that Clinton advocated allowing gays to serve in the military. He pushed for it on his very first day in office.

Republicans and the military threatened to bring down his Presidency over this issue and Clinton was pressured to sign don't ask, don't tell, as an interim step. A huge improvement over the prior policy. He shouldn't have signed it of course, but all gay people know that Clinton was advocating on the gay-rights side of the issue.

And don't ask, don't tell is violated daily. The military fires people who "never tell" on a daily basis. They scour online sites like Myspace to find out if soldiers are gay. They spot a soldier holding hands off base, and they fire him.

And of course, we all know that the military "asks" all the time if people are gay. In other words, the military is breaking the law. Shocker.

The leaders of the committee involved were the ones briefed. We don't know who they were and we were not told who.

Dick, it's an intelligence operation, so that's the committee that should be briefed. And why don't we know who? I see no reason to be so accepting. I'd like very much to know that the administration briefs the appropriate people in Congress on its covert activities. That's the checks and balances thing we value.

Your question assumes that the only authority we can look to is a "trust us" from the administration. If I heard more from the members of Congress who were briefed on Swift, I'd have more faith that I was getting enough information to know what damage this story might have caused. You give much more credibility to the adminstration than I do. I have years of good reasons not to.

Elizabeth, It's run out of Treasury. I suspect that the operation is run by FINCEN or another similar outfit. FINCEN gets it's oversight from the House and Senate Banking committees. see their testimony:

I hope no one feels led to publish that the President lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and can often actually be seen on the grounds. I hear he also has a country home outside of Crawford, Texas.

But I agree that you should speak up about this housing story; it should be easy to dust off the letter of outrage you sent when the Times published as detailed a story about the Clinton's Chappaqua home in 2003.

drill sgt., I have only given a cursory look, but the more recent speeches and testimonies listed don't seem to cover the Swift program. And it still seems to me that the operation is about gathering intelligence, and thus should be under the Intelligence committee as well.

You know, DTL, you shoot yourself in the foot often. I personally think Don't Ask/Don't Tell is a stupid law. Gays serve proudly in the military - at least the ones I've known certainly do - and I see no rational reason they shouldn't be allowed to do so and do so openly.

I'm rather late to this thread, but I would like to join in if I may. (So rare to find a 'civil' discussion of the subject!)

Elizabeth, you said, "I would rather cede some exploitations than change who we are, and what we value." An elegant argument. Unfortunately, it fails to take into account that we are facing ruthless foes.

Who do you consider 'heroes' of our glorious past, Beth? Could we agree on FDR and Churchill for starters? If so, do you realize how many clandestine arrangements they made, how many ungodly bargains they struck, how many horrible "secrets" they kept, how many lives were sacrificed merely on their say-so?

If you refuse to acknowledge the terrible burden of leadership during time of war, then you need to go back to the junior high lunch table.

You said, "Die on your feet or live on your knees! In fact, I believe that is a false dilemma."

Nope. It is, in fact, the very essence of the problem we're dealing with. The NYT has managed to magnify the enemy's position, while at the same time minimizing your personal sense of insecurity. Believe me, honey, when I tell you your news is "skewed"!!!

When the dirty bomb goes off, get back to me on Bill Keller, and the rule of law and civil liberty and all that warm, fuzzy stuff.

Downtownlad, take a deep breath, unbunch your lace panties, and wash your meds down with a Cosmopolitan. You're simply embarrassing yourself, and gay people (left or right) everywhere. You're fast becoming a worse troll than the regular troll here in the comments; unlike him, people might actually think that what you say is serious and reflects some sort of majority opinion.

highcotton, those are great examples. I'll counter with the observation that both FDR and Churchill had detractors and were checked in some of their moves for power. FDR's court-packing gambit comes to mind.

The news is indeed skewed, from many angles. But so is the information coming out of the government. I for one will never forget Colin Powell mortaging his lifetime of service and integrity in his UN appearance.

I simply believe we have to be more circumspect and realize that it's not just the dirty bomb we have to worry about, but what the specter of the dirty bomb leads us to accept, without accountability, from our leadership.

No, I did not mean HIV meds. I was thinking more along the lines of Thorazine, since you act like a complete, raving psychopath sometimes.

And I'm glad your first impulse is to go to my personal site, looking for ways to insult me- that's fair, since I don't try to hide my identity. If I wanted to insult you on a more personal level, I don't have that option. But you wouldn't say the insulting, bigoted things that you do if you weren't anonymous, would you?

DTL: I see that Palladian has explained and you have accepted his explanation.

My comment comes down after I post this one because it is, IMO, inappropriate for this site. Ann is a gracious host and strives for civil discussions of various topics. My comment is far from civil and very personal. Absolutely nothing is gained when people start "yelling" at each other on-line or in person.